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Just in case 2800 words about Greta Garbo and Queen Christina wasn't enough for you, here's the stuff I left out!
● For the first time, Garbo consented to rehearsals and extra takes—although not without some fuss. Director Rouben Mamoulian described the process to George Stevens, Jr., a conversation recounted in Conversations with the Great Moviemakers of Hollywood's Golden Age:
"Garbo said to me, 'Oh, I don't rehearse. If I rehearse I become stale. If I do more than one take, I become empty inside.' So I said, 'Miss Garbo, this is incredible. Let's make a deal. I'll do it your way. If that works out it will be marvelous, because I will earn the reputation of being the fastest-shooting director in Hollywood. I'll get through the picture in four weeks instead of eight. But if it doesn't work out you will try to do it my way.
"So I rehearsed the two men for an hour and a half. Then she came in and I told her, 'You start here, you do this, you go there, you do this.' 'Fine.' So we made a first take. Afterwards, I said, 'Well, how do you feel about it?' And she said, 'Fine! Fine!' As she was about to walk past me, she stopped and said, 'Well, how do you feel about it?' I said, 'No good. It's all wrong. Let's rehearse.' She said, 'Believe me. I'll get worse.' I rehearsed the three of them for over an hour, and with each rehearsal she said, 'I'm getting worse. I am completely empty. There is nothing there at all.' Then we shot eight more takes, and I said, 'Print take eight, and print take one also Now, Miss Garbo, tomorrow morning, take one, yours, and take eight, the one I like, will be in projection room. You go in there alone. You see these two takes and then you tell me which I should use in the picture, and I promise to abide by your judgment.' She started walking out and leaned close to my ear, whispering, 'Please do not print take one.' From then on it was wonderful."
And which directors had a good working relationship with Garbo? Clarence Brown, Mamoulian, George Cukor and Ernst Lubitsch, who directed, respectively, Flesh and the Devil, Queen Christina, Camille and Ninotchka, which also happen to be the best movies Garbo ever made.
● Of Garbo's acting technique, Mamoulian said, "There are actors who are intuitive and actors who reason. Sometimes they are a combination of both, but that's rare. The greatest thing is intuition. For instance with Garbo, I would say to her, 'This mood is like the purple sunset, when the leaves turn their shadows, and now and then a yellow falls down.' She would say, "Oh, I know.'"
● The studio offered Leslie Howard, Franchot Tone, Nils Asther and Bruce Cabot as leading men. Garbo settled on Laurence Olivier based on his performance in Westward Passage. But after a disastrous rehearsal made it clear Garbo would never warm up to Olivier, she insisted on her old co-star John Gilbert in the role. Despite the fact that his career was in eclipse, Garbo's contract gave her complete control over all aspects of the production; she was comfortable with him and also felt she owed him a shot at commercial redemption given his role in promoting her early career; so over Louis B. Mayer's strenuous objections, Gilbert wound up playing the Spanish envoy, Antonio.
Contrary to Louis Mayer's slander, Gilbert had a fine voice, but by 1933 audiences were no longer willing to give him a chance. He made only one more picture then died of a heart attack in 1936.
King Vidor, who directed Gilbert in The Big Parade, speculated (again to George Steven, Jr.), "What I believe happened was that he was the image of the aggressive lover, and they thought he could just speak the same words he did when doing silent scenes that nobody actually heard. He would arouse himself by saying things like 'I love you, I adore you, I worship you. I can't wait to get you alone tonight,' the kind of things that were funny when you heard them. So I think it wasn't his high voice but that you couldn't just take an image and suddenly change it by putting a lot of words on the soundtrack. The words destroyed the image. You'll see that a lot in life—somebody will look like something and then they'll start to talk with maybe a deep Texas accent and it changes the image."
● The scene where Garbo wanders around the bedroom, touching everything and commenting "In the future in my memory, I shall live a great deal in this room," was choreographed like a dance and performed to a metronome.
● The famous last close-up which begins as a medium shot then zooms in and holds on Garbo's face was shot with a 48mm lens, a lens which would typically, as GarboForever.com puts it, make the pores of her face look like the craters of the moon. In order to achieve the sharp focus of the medium shot but the soft focus of the close-up, director Mamoulian held a long strip of glass, clear on one end, gradually becoming more diffuse at the other, in front of the lens and as the camera dollied in moved the glass across it.
Between Jackie Coogan's turn in Charlie Chaplin's 1921 comedy classic, The Kid, and the advent of box office phenomenon Shirley Temple in the early 1930s, no child star was bigger or better than "America's Boy," Jackie Cooper.
Born in 1922, Cooper broke into movies at the age of seven, working in the Our Gang comedies at the Hal Roach Studios for $50 a week. Cooper became a star just two years later when he landed the lead role in Skippy, a film version of the day's most famous comic strip. (So popular was the strip, in fact, that Skippy brand peanut butter was named for it—or was it? Strip creator Percy Crosby filed suit and won a decision in the U.S. Patent Court, yet seventy-six years later, Skippy is still my peanut butter of choice.)
Skippy—the movie not the peanut butter—was the one where Cooper's uncle, director Norman Taurog, famously threatened to shoot Cooper's dog if the boy didn't cry on cue, then sent a production assistant outside with a gun loaded with blanks. Cooper heard the shot and predictably cried buckets. Only nine years old at the time, he's still the youngest actor to be nominated for an Oscar in a lead role.
Like most of us, he slept through the ceremony, although in his case, in Oscar-winner Marie Dressler's lap. "I was much more interested in not having to go to school that day than I was in the ceremony," he later admitted.
Cooper was even better a year later in the award-winning boxing movie, The Champ. Directed by King Vidor, The Champ is an unabashed tearjerker of the first water and turned Cooper and co-star Wallace Beery into the unlikeliest of screen teams. The pair making four feature-length movies together between 1931 and 1935.
Beery won an Oscar playing an alcoholic, over-the- hill boxer with delusions of grandeur, the kind of guy who wins a horse for his son in a crap game, then promptly loses it back again—twice! When he's not gambling, he's hungover in a fleabag hotel room over a saloon, haunted by what might have been and fueled by pipe dreams of another shot at the title. Cooper is the champ's son, who even at nine years of age is a classic enabler. He adores his father but has been disappointed too many times to lie to himself anymore, even as he lies to the Champ.
Cooper more than holds his own in his scenes with the more experienced Beery, for example, in an early scene when fight promoters call his father a drunk and a "palooka." Eyes glistening with a mixture of rage, disappointment and humiliation, Cooper holds his defiant pose for a moment, then his shoulders slump and he turns away.
"You don't believe what they said about me being drunk the night I lost the championship, do ya, Dink."
"No," says Cooper, slump shouldered, not looking at his father, and starting to clean up after him like he always does.
It's a formula that has served Hollywood well, right up to and including Mickey Rourke's 2008 comeback in The Wrestler, and won Frances Marion an Oscar for the screenplay, her second.
Cooper himself was rather dismissive of most of his early screen roles. "Very often on some of this stuff when I'd have to go to work. I'd just give the script a cursory glance. I had no training, and I was a quick study, so nobody knew how involved or not involved I was. But I look at that stuff now and I can see I wasn't involved, and I wasn't very good."
Cooper and Beery made three more films together, including Treasure Island. "They kept me in short pants as long as they could," Cooper said of his days as a child actor, "until they were shaving the hair on my legs because it was beginning to photograph."
Ironically, because of his own experiences, Cooper grew up opposed to children working full-time as actors. "No amount of rationalization, no excuses, can make up for what a kid loses—what I lost—when a normal childhood is abandoned for a movie career.
His 1981 autobiography was entitled Please Don't Shoot My Dog.
Cooper left Hollywood during World War II, serving in the United States Navy where he attained the rank of Captain. After the war, the transition from child star to adult performer was difficult for Cooper, but he eventually wound up in television, both as an actor and as a director. As the latter, he won two Emmys for directing episodes of MASH (one of the funny ones) and The White Shadow. Maybe his most famous movie role after childhood was that of Daily Planet editor Perry White in four Superman movies between 1978 and 1987.
Cooper retired in 1989. He has four children and lives in California.
Okay, I admit defeat. As I've mentioned more than once, I've been working on an essay about achievements in the use of sound in movies to date (1927-1931), catching up on technical and artistic breakthroughs after the work of early pioneers such as Thomas Edison and Lee De Forest led to the premiere of The Jazz Singer on October 6, 1927.
I planned to write about people like two-time Oscar winner George Groves, the sound technician who recorded The Jazz Singer; and Douglas Shearer, the brother of actress Norma Shearer, hired by Irving Thalberg out of pure nepotism, who turned out to be a sound editing genius and went on to win fourteen Oscars, many of them for technical innovations Hollywood still uses to this day. And I wanted to write about directors such as Rouben Mamoulian and René Clair who were bright enough to work around the limitations of early sound recording technology to give us movies as fluid as anything the silent era had ever produced.
And I'm 1500 words into this essay and you know what? It's boring. And I'm bored with it. And I have to figure that if I'm bored, there's no way you won't be bored. And besides, there are Katies to be awarded, with the nominees for supporting actress waiting eagerly in the wings. And Katie-Bar-The-Door is coming home early today and I still have to run to the grocery store, walk the dog again and bake a chess pie.
So let's just concede defeat and move on.
But rather than flush all that hard work down the intertube, I'm serving up the leftovers in the form of bullets (or big dots if bullets sound threatening) and here are some pictures to go with them.
● Vitaphone, Warner Brothers' system for pressing sound onto 16-inch discs, was not the first technique for synchronizing sound and film but it was the first practical technology to do so, generating a sound loud enough for an audience to hear and with a higher fidelity than sound-on-film technologies could produce.
● Contrary to popular belief, the first feature-length film using the Vitaphone process was not The Jazz Singer but a John Barrymore movie, Don Juan, released on August 6, 1926. Don Juan, however, included only a recorded score and sound effects and the film was not enough of a hit to make back the costs of using the Vitaphone process. Only the persistence of producer Adolph Zukor convinced the Warner brothers—Harry and Sam—to make another feature-length sound film.
● The technology used to record The Jazz Singer was so primitive, no sound editing was possible. Al Jolson's songs were recorded and mixed as he performed them and what you saw was what you got. Except for a couple of spontaneous ad-libs—including the immortal line "Wait a minute, wait a minute, you ain't heard nothin' yet!" spoken by Al Jolson as a bridge between "Dirty Hands, Dirty Face" and "Toot Toot Tootsie"—there's no spoken dialogue in the movie. Technician George Groves is credited with recording the sound. In his career, Groves received eight Oscar nominations, winning twice, an incredible number considering he only worked on twenty movies.
● Ironically, despite the enormous success of The Jazz Singer, the Vitaphone disc technology itself proved to be too uneconomical for large-scale use. The studio had to distribute a separate disc with each copy of the movie and each theater needed an operator skilled enough to synch the recording with the film, driving up costs. In addition, because assembling and editing a Vitaphone picture was not just a simple matter of cutting and splicing film, but also of mixing and pressing new recordings, directors and film editors found the technology difficult to use. In 1932, Warner Brothers gave up on the Vitaphone process and transferring the recordings, as had other studios before it, to optical tracks that were laid over the edge of the film negative.
● MGM's The Broadway Melody, billed as the first "all-talking, all-singing, all-dancing" musical, was the top grossing movie of 1929 as well as the first sound picture to win the Academy Award for best picture, and further cemented sound's commercial future. 
Douglas Shearer out of necessity invented the concept of the "playback"—pre-recording a song that performers would then dance and lip-synch to—when the choreography on a huge dance number that had already been performed and recorded was deemed unsuitable. Rather than bring the orchestra back to the sound stage, Shearer figured out how to reuse the sound from the previous take, and the cast performed the dance number with its new choreography to a playback of the song. This technique became the industry standard for decades. Shearer wound up working on more than nine hundred movies in his career, was nominated for twenty-one Oscars, won seven and was awarded an additional seven Oscars for technical, scientific and engineering achievements.
● King Vidor's Hallelujah!, the 1929 musical with an all-black cast, for the first time effectively mixed sound recorded on location and sound dubbed in the studio.
● Although Hollywood produced a lot of forgettable movies in the early sound era, a handful of artists saw the possibilities in sound and used it in a way that changed the course of movie history. Rouben Mamoulian, a director of Broadway theater productions, and René Clair, a young French director then known for a handful of experimental films, managed to make movies characterized by fluid camera work despite the bulky, restrictive nature of sound recording equipment.
● Mamoulian's Applause took the camera into the streets of New York (and under them, into the subway), and unlike other sound films released that year, took care to capture the sounds of the city rather than shut them out, giving the movie, which is otherwise dated and melodramatic, a documentary feel.
● Lewis Milestone used sound masterfully in All Quiet On The Western Front. The off-camera sounds of the war—incessant shelling, machine gun fire and particularly the gasping sounds of a French soldier as he dies—deepened the audience's emotional investment in the story.
● René Clair with Le Million was the first to use sound and sound effects in a non- realistic way to comment on the action—for example, as the characters fight over a jacket containing a winning lottery ticket, instead of recording the sound of the actors fighting, Clair used the sounds of a rugby match, the crowd roaring, the players grunting, the referee's whistle blowing, to comment on the absurd nature of the action. It's a commonplace joke now, so often used ever since, our ears don't hear it. But it was a startling innovative at the time.
● Just as important is when Clair doesn't use sound at all. Some conversations—the unimportant or entirely predictable—are not overheard, merely observed. The effect underscores to what degree how much of what we say in any given day is merely rote and the silence in Le Million is as effective a joke as the funny sound effects.
That's it. That's all I've got. Oh, I did track down John Lennon's quote from the 1971 Rolling Stone interviews that somehow seemed pertinent to a discussion of how an artist sees potential where a non-artist sees only problems: "I'm an artist, and if you give me a tuba, I'll bring you something out of it." 
Rouben Mamoulian, Lewis Milestone, René Clair, and in different ways, George Groves and Douglas Shearer, were artists bringing something new and innovative out of a technology others saw as only a nuisance or a novelty.
My hat's off to them.
Already one of Hollywood's most successful directors, with such hits as The Big Parade, The Crowd and Show People to his credit, King Vidor chose a decidedly off-beat and risky project for his first sound film, a musical based on an idea he had been trying to get off the ground for most of a decade, the story of the African-American experience in the deep South using an all-black cast.
MGM was wary of the project, believing white audiences would resist a film using blacks in leading roles, but Vidor believed so strongly in the project that he offered to work without salary and finally the studio relented. The resulting film, Hallelujah!, premiered in August 1929.
The story itself is pretty standard fare for a musical—a weak man (Daniel L. Haynes) is torn between the good girl who loves him and the jazz singing vamp (Nina Mae McKinney) who only wants to use him—set in the farmland outside Memphis, Tennessee, where the movie was filmed. After accidentally killing his own brother in a bar room brawl, Haynes's Zeke becomes an itinerant preacher only to be drawn back into McKinney's web when he runs into her at a tent revival meeting.
The music alternates between spirituals and jazz numbers, and while Mc- Kinney turns in a performance of Irving Berlin's "Swanee Shuffle" that audiences at the time found electrifying, it's the spirituals—"Sometimes I Feel Like A Motherless Child," "Go Down Moses (Let My People Go)," and many others—Vidor is most interested in. He was determined to show the role religion and music played in the South he grew up in and, as a Tennessee boy myself, I think it's one of the few movies to come out of Hollywood that captures something of this aspect of Southern life without condescending to it, or worse.
Hallelujah! was also notable for its early success at combining sound recorded on location with sound recorded in the studio, a feat which was considered a great technical achievement at the time.
Hallelujah! is not a perfect movie and despite three Katie nominations, I don't want to oversell it. The plot is a stock Hollywood musical contrivance, the acting is amateurish (not surprising since Vidor mostly used amateurs) and the characters are often stock racial stereotypes, such as the sex-crazy black man or the wise "Mammy." Vidor himself later admitted that despite his best efforts, the story was at times condescending to the African-American experience.
And yet I have to say that while the black farmers, preachers and jazz singers of Vidor's Hallelujah! sometimes lack nuance, so too did Hollywood's portraits of flappers, gangsters, Broadway producers, newspapermen, housewives, politicians and pretty much anything else it set its sights on. Films of the Early Sound Era still had one foot firmly in the Silent Era when exposition was difficult and subtle characterizations nearly impossible. Filmmakers served up characters in a sort of visual shorthand—this is the good guy, this is the bad guy—for the quick understanding of the audience, and while modern audiences may find some of the portrayals in Hallelujah! startling, they aren't much different from the characters played in the all-white musical The Broadway Melody which won the Oscar for best picture the year before.
What distinguishes Hallelujah! from, say, The Birth Of A Nation, which is also filled with stock racial stereotypes, is that the characters and story are based on Vidor's actual, if flawed, observations of African-American life rather than D.W. Griffith's thoughtless regurgitation of racist stereotypes. Vidor was deeply sympathetic to and interested in the lives of black Americans (as, indeed, I get the impression he was of most people). I think the only regret Griffith felt about putting racial stereotypes on the screen was that he wasn't allowed to hit those who criticized him for it with a hammer.
Commercially, Hallelujah! was the flop MGM feared it would be, although certainly the studio's unwillingness to distribute the film to entire sections of the country for fear of a racist backlash was a major contributor to its failure. Critically, the reception has been a bit friendlier. The Academy recognized Vidor with an Oscar nomination for best director at the 1930 ceremony and in 2008, the National Film Preservation Board included Hallelujah! in the National Film Registry. That same year, in honor of Vintage Black Cinema, the U.S. Postal Service pictured an advertizing poster for Hallelujah! on a 42¢ stamp.
Nina Mae McKinney was just sixteen years old at the time of filming, but she made such an impression that MGM signed her to a five year contract. Unfortunately for McKinney, however, MGM was reluctant to cast a black actress in a significant role and most of her work was done on loan to other studios. She soon left Hollywood for Europe where she worked mostly in cabaret shows until World War II broke out. She made twenty movies altogether and died in 1967 at the age of fifty-four. She was inducted into the Black Filmmakers Hall of Fame in 1978.
As for the film's other stars, Daniel L. Haynes appeared in a handful of movies, mostly uncredited bit parts, and also worked on the Broadway stage. Child actor Matthew "Stymie" Beard played in thirty-seven Our Gang comedies, usually wearing an oversized bowler hat (he was later replaced by Billie "Buckwheat" Thomas). Sam McDaniel, brother of Oscar winner Hattie McDaniel, appeared in over two hundred movies, usually in an uncredited role as a waiter, janitor or porter, including one role I remember, "Charlie the garage attendant" who provides Fred MacMurray with a critical alibi in Double Indemnity. Likewise, Blue Washington, one of the few veteran actors in the cast, continued playing bit parts until his final movie in 1957.
The rest of the cast quickly faded from view.
Despite the commercial failure of Hallelujah!, Vidor remained one of Hollywood's most sought-after directors, working on such films as The Champ, Stella Dallas and War and Peace. In 1939, when director Victor Fleming left the set of The Wizard of Oz to take over the troubled production of Gone With The Wind, Vidor stepped in and although he did not receive a screen credit, directed the film's Kansas scenes, including Judy Garland's beloved performance of "Over the Rainbow."
Vidor received three more nominations for direction and in 1979 was awarded an honorary Oscar "[f]or his incomparable achievements as a cinematic creator and innovator." He died in 1982 at the age of eighty-eight.
Trivia: While Hal- lelujah! is often remem- bered as the first movie with an all-black cast, a much lesser known musical, Hearts in Dixie, also starring an all-black cast, predated it by five months. Hearts in Dixie starred Stepin Fetchit (real name Lincoln Perry), whose stage name has become synonymous with the negative stereotyping of African-Americans in film. Some revisionist historians consider him a trailblazer who paved the way for later African-American performers. Others point out that white audiences of the time often swallowed the characterization whole and used it as justification for racist policies. In any event, Perry became a millionaire playing the role in more than fifty movies (later blowing it all and declaring bankruptcy).
The NAACP presented him with a Special Image Award in 1976 and the Black Filmmakers Hall of Fame inducted him as a member in 1978. He died in 1985.
If you're interested, two biographies with very different takes on Lincoln Perry have been published within the last five years, Stepin Fetchit: The Life & Times of Lincoln Perry and Shuffling To Ignominy: The Tragedy Of Stepin Fetchit, both available in paperback.
For those of you not taking the Metro down to Nationals Park tonight to see Randy Johnson go for win number 300, it's King Vidor night on Turner Classic Movies. King Vidor, you may recall, won a Katie for his screenplay of the classic downer The Crowd. That movie, along with a documentary and four other movies Vidor directed will be playing tonight, June 3, 2009, starting at 8 p.m. Eastern time.
Here's the schedule straight from TCM's website:
8:00pm [Documentary] Men Who Made the Movies, The: King Vidor (1973)
Film clips and an exclusive interview capture the career of the top action director. Cast: Jennifer Jones, Gary Cooper Dir: Richard Schickel BW-55 mins
9:00pm [Drama] Crowd, The (1928)
In this silent film, an office worker deals with the simple joys and tragedies of married life.
Cast: Eleanor Boardman, James Murray, Bert Roach, Estelle Clark Dir: King Vidor BW-93 mins
10:45pm [Drama] Champ, The (1931)
A broken-down prizefighter battles to keep custody of his son.
Cast: Wallace Beery, Jackie Cooper, Irene Rich, Rosco Ates Dir: King Vidor BW-86 mins
12:15am [Western] Duel In The Sun (1946)
A fiery half-breed comes between a rancher's good and evil sons.
Cast: Jennifer Jones, Joseph Cotten, Gregory Peck, Lionel Barrymore Dir: William Dieterle C-144 mins
2:45am [Drama] Fountainhead, The (1949)
An idealistic architect battles corrupt business interests and his love for a married woman.
Cast: Gary Cooper, Patricia Neal, Raymond Massey, Kent Smith Dir: King Vidor BW-113 mins
4:45am [Drama] Our Daily Bread (1934)
When he inherits a small farm, a Depression-weary man turns it into a collective operation.
Cast: Karen Morley, Tom Keene, Barbara Pepper, Addison Richards Dir: King Vidor BW-74 mins
Director and film historian Peter Bogdanovich has called 1928 the greatest year in the history of movies, which is definitely saying something. If we expand the time frame a bit to include both 1927 and 1928, I will agree that he's on to something.
Between January 1, 1927 and the end of 1928, more than a dozen films were released which might reasonably make a list of the best movies ever made, including The General, Metropolis, Napoleon (released too early in 1927 to qualify for this year's Katies), Sunrise: A Song Of Two Humans, The Crowd, The Man Who Laughs, The Student Prince In Old Heidelberg, The Circus, Wings; Laugh, Clown, Laugh and a handful of late 1928 releases, The Passion Of Joan Of Arc, The Wind, The Cameraman, Steamboat Bill, Jr., The Docks Of New York and The Wedding March (eligible for next year's Katies). Greta Garbo was never more popular, Gloria Swanson was still doing great work, Emil Jannings hadn't joined the Nazi party. Lon Chaney, Mary Pickford and Lillian Gish gave the best performances of their careers. Directors Murnau, Chaplin, Keaton, Lang and Dreyer were at or near their peaks, and Lubitsch was emerging as the next great director. Movie audiences wouldn't see such an outpouring of quality again until 1939, the year most film historians fix as the best ever, and it's clear, at least in retrospect, that silent movies had reached their highest ever level of artistic achievement and were poised for even greater breakthroughs.
And yet, once The Jazz Singer hit theaters, studios couldn't pay audiences to see anything but talkies. Silent movies were better than ever but for the audiences of the time, they might as well have never been made. It's as if the "Mona Lisa" were hanging in Louvre unseen while art lovers rushed past it to crowd around a McDonald's placemat.
There wouldn't again be such a disconnect between quality and box office receipts until the present age.
Commercially speaking—in the long run, the only language Hollywood speaks—silent movies were dead and there was no going back.
Unfortunately, the new sound technology was primitive, relying on large, immobile cameras and unreliable microphones that glued actors in place and returned movies to that place from whence they had just escaped, the stage-bound theater. It took about five years for sound technology to become workable enough for directors to move the camera again and more than a decade for Orson Welles and cinematographer Gregg Toland to remember that they could.
In the meantime, in case you need reminding, this is my list of movies that I consider the must-see movies of 1927-28. Unlike my list of Twenty Silent Movies To Cut Your Teeth On, not all of these movies are equally accessible to a viewer unfamiliar with silent movies, but I do believe every one of them is worth the time and effort is you are so inclined.
The Circus—Charlie Chaplin's comedy of a tramp who finds love and work in the circus
The Crowd—King Vidor's gritty tale of the American Dream turned nightmare
Laugh, Clown, Laugh—Lon Chaney as a man destroyed by love
The Man Who Laughs—a macabre love story about a man with a face that inspired Heath Ledger's Joker
The Student Prince In Old Heidelberg—a bittersweet romantic comedy about a prince who falls for a commoner
Sunrise: A Song Of Two Humans—my pick for the best movie of the year, about a marriage in crisis
Wings—a rip-snorting war picture about World War I flying aces and the girl they left behind
All but two of these movies, The Student Prince In Old Heidelberg and Wings, are available on DVD.
You might also check out Sadie Thompson, the 1928 Gloria Swanson-Lionel Barrymore movie based on Somerset Maugham's short story "Rain." Time hasn't been kind to the print and the last reel has been lost, but film historians reconstructed the ending with the use of still photographs and what remains is very good. Sadie Thompson earned Swanson an Oscar nomination, the first of three, and might have earned her and Barrymore (the latter in a supporting role) Katies for their work if I could have been more certain of what I was seeing. Sadie Thompson is available on DVD.
What can I tell you? This whole business of handing out awards, even with eighty years of hindsight, is a frustratingly subjective business. It only gets worse the closer to the present we get.
Before you go to bed Monday night, be sure to set your recorder to tape King Vidor's classic anti-war movie, The Big Parade. It's on Turner Classic Movies on Tuesday morning, May 26, 2009, at 2:15 a.m. It's part of TCM's three-day Memorial Day marathon.
I'm sure you'll remember that The Big Parade turned up on my list of Twenty Silent Movies To Cut Your Teeth On. The scene where our boys march into the teeth of German sniper and machine gun fire at the battle of Belleau Wood is worth the price of admission alone.
There's also a nifty John Gilbert romance thrown in for good measure. That's for lupner.
The Big Parade is credited with being the first realistic war movie ever made. It was a huge hit in its day and was the biggest grossing movie of the 1920s, hauling in $22 million world-wide which considering that movie admissions cost, what, a nickel? is an astounding amount of money ...
If you've been suffering the effects of our current economy, I wouldn't race right out to rent this story of a small town boy with big time dreams who moves to New York City and makes, well, not much of himself; but I will say that to have made this grim critique of the American Dream while the Twenties were still roaring along was fairly prescient of King Vidor and you might try tracking this one down whenever you get to feeling better.
If The Crowd is not quite the lasting work of art that Sunrise is, that may be in part because it has been copied so many times (and its copies copied) that its insights have gone a bit stale with repetition. Orson Welles took up a similar theme in The Magnificent Ambersons, added complexity, and deepened it, and Billy Wilder took it up again in The Apartment and put yet a different spin on it and created another lasting work of art. But you have to start somewhere and it's a touching if unsentimental story and very well acted, particularly by Eleanor Boardman as the long-suffering wife (is there any other kind?) of a husband whose practical skills as a breadwinner aren't nearly equal to his grandiose dreams.
The other great strength of the movie is its near doc- umentary feel as it describes a paycheck-to-paycheck existence in the New York City of the late 1920s. Vidor used a hidden camera and shot much of the film on location and this added authenticity and realism to the story.
Indeed, the fact that Vidor took his camera into the tiny bathroom of a cold-water flat and dared show his audience a working toilet is the one of the reasons Louis B. Mayer cited in making sure there were no awards for the writer-director come Oscar time. Vidor did however receive an Oscar nomination for direction and was nominated four more times in his career before receiving an honorary Oscar in 1979 "[f]or his incomparable achievements as a cinematic creator and innovator."
All of which begs the question: am I giving The Crowd a Katie for its screen- play or am really giving it an award for its cinematography and the audacity of its director's vision?
I'll be honest with you, even though I am a writer myself (yes, two novels, an agent and everything), it's a little difficult for me to access the quality of a screenplay, especially the screenplay for a silent movie. Yes, there are certain clues you can look for—the quality of the dialogue (or title cards in the case of a silent movie), whether the story hangs together, the insights into the human condition that might show up on the printed page—but the fact is, no matter what auteur theorists say (that the director is the sole author of a film), movies are such a collaborative effort, it's hard to say where one person's work leaves off and another's begins. When you assess a screenplay, you have to remember that actors improvise and breathe life into the characters, the director pushes them to emphasize different approaches, the film editor influences the story's pace and cohesion, the cinematographer and the score's composer affect mood. So by the end of the day, you wonder whose work are you handing an award to.
Here, the story's architecture is so sound, it's become the blueprint for any number of similar stories that followed it. The insight into the human condition is certainly chilling. And while the title cards read like hokey homilies that belong in a Hallmark greeting card, they underscore the protagonist's unrealistic view of the hard world. You can't ask much more than that out of a screenplay.
In any event, whatever it means, I am giving The Crowd a Katie and I am content to do so.
Which reminds me. King Vidor wasn't the only person who wrote this movie and he's not the only person getting a Katie for it.
Co-writer Joseph Farnham, one of the founders of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, received the only Oscar ever awarded for "title writing," although that award was for a body of work rather than a specific film. In addition to The Crowd, he wrote the titles for thirty-one movies in 1927 and 1928, including another Katie nominee, Laugh, Clown, Laugh. His best work was the play The Big Parade which Vidor adapted into one of the best movies of the Silent Era. Farnham died two years after winning the Oscar, making him the first Oscar-winner to do so—and the first Katie winner to die as well. Hmm, the Curse of the Katie? That's another thing we'll have to keep track of.
And as for John V.A. Weaver, the final member of this trio of Katie award winners, all I can tell you is that he was a Southern-born Broadway playwright who went west to write for the movies and died in 1938 at the age of 45. His best screenplay aside from The Crowd was probably his adaptation of The Adventures Of Tom Sawyer, the last movie he ever worked on.
In 1998, The Library of Congress selected The Crowd as one of the first twenty-five movies to be preserved in the National Film Registry.
PICTURE: Sunrise: A Song Of Two Humans (prod. William Fox)
ACTOR: Lon Chaney (Laugh, Clown, Laugh)
ACTRESS: Mary Pickford (My Best Girl)
DIRECTOR: F.W. Murnau (Sunrise: A Song Of Two Humans)
SUPPORTING ACTOR: Jean Hersholt (The Student Prince In Old Heidelberg)
SUPPORTING ACTRESS: Clara Bow (Wings)
SCREENPLAY: King Vidor and John V.A. Weaver; titles by Joseph Farnham (The Crowd)
SPECIAL AWARDS: The Circus (prod. Charles Chaplin) (Best Picture-Comedy); Al Jolson (The Jazz Singer) (Best Actor-Comedy or Musical); Eleanor Boardman (The Crowd) (Best Actress-Drama); George Groves (The Jazz Singer) (Special Achievement In The Use Of Sound); "Toot Toot Tootsie" (The Jazz Singer) (Best Song); Charles Rosher and Karl Struss (Sunrise: A Song Of Two Humans) (Cinematography)
MUST-SEE MOVIES OF 1927-28: Sunrise: A Song Of Two Humans; The Man Who Laughs; The Student Prince In Old Heidelberg; The Circus; Wings; The Crowd; Laugh, Clown, Laugh
The most popular movie of 1927 was The Jazz Singer, which introduced synchronized sound to the movies at last. Audiences were thrilled not just to see Al Jolson singing but to hear him singing—and after plowing through dozens of silent movies in the past couple of weeks, I can't say I blame them. You forget how much information you process through your ears and how much pleasure you can get from a human voice—at least until you do without for a while.
Only one problem with The Jazz Singer: it's a terrible movie. Really. I mean, yeah, being able to put sound in a movie was a tremendous breakthrough and audiences ate it up with a spoon, but beyond it's importance now as a historical footnote, I can't recommend it.
As for everything else that was released between August 1, 1927 and July 31, 1928 (I'm following Oscar's convention of straddling the two years), the Academy actually did a pretty good job of distinguishing the wheat from the chaff even if the awards were largely parceled out as a result of insider politicking and studio manipulation.
Wings (Best Production) and Sunrise (Unique and Artistic Production) won the two best picture awards, Emil Jannings was a well-respected actor and won for The Way Of All Flesh and The Last Command (remember, the award in those days was handed out for a body of work rather than a specific picture), and best actress winner, Janet Gaynor, was the star of the best movie of the year, Sunrise.
There were two best director trophies that year, one for comedy, one for drama. Lewis Milestone, who would win another Oscar for directing the classic All Quiet On The Western Front, won for the former; Frank Borzage, another two time winner, won the latter.
All respectable choices. With the benefit of more than eighty years worth of hindsight, however, I think the Academy could have done better.
That's where the Katie-Bar-The-Door Awards come in.
I've done away with the splitting of categories—one director instead of two, one best picture award instead of the unexplained and unexplainable Best Production and Unique and Artistic Production awards.
I'm also doing away with Academy's habit of spreading the award for writing across a wide variety of ever-changing categories, including best original screenplay, best adapted screenplay, motion picture story, story and screenplay, screenplay and even this year's award for "title writing." With the Katies, it's one award, Best Screenplay, regardless of whether it's based on another source, wholly original or, as is often the case, a thinly disguised rip-off of last year's popular movie.
As I did with the career achieve- ment awards for the Silent Era, I will explain my choices in a series of essays over the next couple of weeks.
I've also included here a list of what I think are the must-see movies of the year, and will include a must-see list for each year I hand out awards.
Finally, I have included choices for best supporting actor and actress even though the Academy did not create those categories until 1936. I felt I otherwise would have ended up ignoring too many performances worth recognition. Besides, it gave me another excuse to see even more movies—and what could be wrong with that?
Notes: I don't have an official Fun-Stupid movie pick for 1927-28, but two might fit the bill: Wings is overly long for a silent movie and a bit corny but it also has at least an hour's worth of some of the best stunt flying and aerial dogfights ever filmed; and Charlie Chaplin's The Circus features a lot of physical comedy and acrobatic stunts and is readily available.
Before I really launch this blog, I thought I'd share some historical notes about the Academy Awards, courtesy of probably Danny Peary's Alternate Oscars or one of Roger Ebert's movie reviews, TCM's Robert Osborne, The Internet Movie Database or my good friend Bellotoot—who knows, I can't remember:
The first Oscars were awarded on May 16, 1929, and right from the start the Academy blew it—and the Academy has pretty much been blowing it ever since.
First, for reasons known only to Louis B. Mayer, the MGM studio head who thought up the Academy Awards, the first Oscars were awarded to movies that had premiered in Los Angeles County between August 1, 1927, and July 31, 1928. Why he chose to straddle two calendar years like that I can't imagine but it confused the hell out of voters who initially gave the award for best picture to Buster Keaton's masterpiece, The General, which would have been a truly brilliant pick, one of the few in Academy history, except that The General had come out in early 1927 and wasn't eligible for the award.
Then when it looked like independent film maverick and all-around pain-in-the-industry's rump Charlie Chaplin might walk away with an award, the Academy—that is, Mayer meeting in a smoke-filled room with the other heads of the various studios—took Chaplin's name off the ballot and handed him an honorary Oscar instead.
They also figured that handing a bunch of awards to the most popular movie of the year, The Jazz Singer, wasn't going to help sell extra tickets, to The Jazz Singer or anything else, so they arbitrarily declared it ineligible and handed its producers an honorary Oscar as well.
Further, the Academy's leaders couldn't even figure out what they meant by "best" when it came to awarding the best picture, so they had two best pictures, one called Best Production (Wings), the other called Unique And Artistic Production (Sunrise). Neither of which, apparently, was the popular choice. That would have been The Crowd. But Mayer didn't like The Crowd or its director, King Vidor, so he vetoed that pick even though it was a product of his own studio.
Crazy motherhumper, that Louis B.
And finally, when even all those machinations were not enough to guarantee results to their liking, the studio bosses said to hell with the voters and split the awards between themselves, ensuring the major studios were well-represented and everyone else take the hindmost.
The result was a mess, motivated not by Hollywood's desire to recognize what was good, but to sell tickets, settle scores and congratulate themselves on what a wonderful job they were doing.
Nothing much has changed.
And except for maybe the Nobel Peace Prize, it's the most successful set of awards ever created, generating more blather and second-guessing, I suspect, that all the other awards combined. And what more, really, do you want from an award, especially one named after Bette Davis's ex-husband—other than maybe fewer dance numbers and shorter acceptance speeches.
Why am I telling you this? We'll talk about that tomorrow ...
Just in case 2800 words about Greta Garbo and Queen Christina wasn't enough for you, here's the stuff I left out!
"So I rehearsed the two men for an hour and a half. Then she came in and I told her, 'You start here, you do this, you go there, you do this.' 'Fine.' So we made a first take. Afterwards, I said, 'Well, how do you feel about it?' And she said, 'Fine! Fine!' As she was about to walk past me, she stopped and said, 'Well, how do you feel about it?' I said, 'No good. It's all wrong. Let's rehearse.' She said, 'Believe me. I'll get worse.' I rehearsed the three of them for over an hour, and with each rehearsal she said, 'I'm getting worse. I am completely empty. There is nothing there at all.' Then we shot eight more takes, and I said, 'Print take eight, and print take one also Now, Miss Garbo, tomorrow morning, take one, yours, and take eight, the one I like, will be in projection room. You go in there alone. You see these two takes and then you tell me which I should use in the picture, and I promise to abide by your judgment.' She started walking out and leaned close to my ear, whispering, 'Please do not print take one.' From then on it was wonderful."
And which directors had a good working relationship with Garbo? Clarence Brown, Mamoulian, George Cukor and Ernst Lubitsch, who directed, respectively, Flesh and the Devil, Queen Christina, Camille and Ninotchka, which also happen to be the best movies Garbo ever made.
● The studio offered Leslie Howard, Franchot Tone, Nils Asther and Bruce Cabot as leading men. Garbo settled on Laurence Olivier based on his performance in Westward Passage. But after a disastrous rehearsal made it clear Garbo would never warm up to Olivier, she insisted on her old co-star John Gilbert in the role. Despite the fact that his career was in eclipse, Garbo's contract gave her complete control over all aspects of the production; she was comfortable with him and also felt she owed him a shot at commercial redemption given his role in promoting her early career; so over Louis B. Mayer's strenuous objections, Gilbert wound up playing the Spanish envoy, Antonio.
King Vidor, who directed Gilbert in The Big Parade, speculated (again to George Steven, Jr.), "What I believe happened was that he was the image of the aggressive lover, and they thought he could just speak the same words he did when doing silent scenes that nobody actually heard. He would arouse himself by saying things like 'I love you, I adore you, I worship you. I can't wait to get you alone tonight,' the kind of things that were funny when you heard them. So I think it wasn't his high voice but that you couldn't just take an image and suddenly change it by putting a lot of words on the soundtrack. The words destroyed the image. You'll see that a lot in life—somebody will look like something and then they'll start to talk with maybe a deep Texas accent and it changes the image."
● The famous last close-up which begins as a medium shot then zooms in and holds on Garbo's face was shot with a 48mm lens, a lens which would typically, as GarboForever.com puts it, make the pores of her face look like the craters of the moon. In order to achieve the sharp focus of the medium shot but the soft focus of the close-up, director Mamoulian held a long strip of glass, clear on one end, gradually becoming more diffuse at the other, in front of the lens and as the camera dollied in moved the glass across it.
